Moms don’t need a nap—we need time with good friends

Recently, I went on a “girls trip” (I dislike this phrase, but that’s exactly what it was) with some college friends. It was my first night away from my almost one-year-old and my first reunion with these friends in two years. I didn’t particularly “catch up on sleep” or “get in a good long run” or “nourish myself with healthy foods,” but it was the healthiest and fullest I’ve felt in a long time. After an incredibly busy start to the season, it was exactly what I needed.

It was any parent’s dream come true: We slept in (well, some of us did), we ate well (enough, slowly, in peace, not PB&J crusts), we drank our morning coffee slowly and had uninterrupted adult conversations for as long as we wanted! We went out to brunch, to dinner, to drink wine (maybe just a glass or two). We laughed. We listened to each other, fully and without distraction. We shopped, in-person, for ourselves! We were real people, out and about in the world like we were 20. It was magical in every sense.

There’s a lot of pressure to take full advantage of any moment we mothers are not parenting—especially when we’re fortunate enough to get away for a whole weekend. Given any sort of “break,” we are expected to treat it like a golden ticket. We should be squeezing out every ounce of kid-free time to “take care of ourselves”—catching up on sleep, eating well, exercising and filling our spiritual, emotional, social, mental, physical cups to the brim so that we can return home to deplete them once again. 

The truth is there is no one break, no one weekend trip that is going to nourish us to the point of never needing a break again. And honestly, I would rather catch up with my old friends than sleep in or spend an extra 20 minutes exercising. I came home utterly exhausted but wonderfully fulfilled. And all of it was absolutely worth it. When friends from across the country make the effort to fly to the opposite coast and drive hours for one short weekend, that tells you everything you need to know.

Here’s the thing about old friends: They knew you before you were “mommy” and maybe even before you knew who you were. They knew you through wild college (and post-college) nights, break-ups, first full-time jobs and the many stumbles we take through early adulthood. But what’s striking to me is that, as we’re still-evolving thirty-somethings, we’re still learning new things about each other. We may have grown a lot since college, but we’re still changing, still learning, still accumulating experiences that shape us. We might be college graduates and working professionals, but we are all still beginners at something. It keeps us humble and it makes us diverse in our talents and flaws. Our shared experiences from years past are what will always keep us together, regardless of what the future holds.

I’m no psychologist, but I believe that any of them will tell you the importance of social support networks, community care and having reliable friends to call on when you’re in need. Knowing that you have people who are there for you is a powerful measure of your overall health (both mental and physical).

Maybe we don’t all have a “village” physically surrounding us every time we need support, but our group text game is strong. Would all of them answer the phone in a heartbeat, at any hour? Without a doubt. Maybe we’re not all in the same circumstances, but you better believe we care about where each of us is at, whether we’ve experienced it ourselves or not. Moms don’t just need a quick nap to recharge. We need to feel like our old selves again, and who better to do it with than old friends who remember who we really are.